I was minding my own business, looking at the art, when a gray-haired stranger walked up to me. “Mark Twain actually spoke in this room,” she said, referring to the repurposed Sunday school auditorium at the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where W. David Hancock’s play “Master” was about to start.

“I wonder what he’d say about all this,” she continued. Now she pointed to the table of objects I was studying, some of which were purported to be relics of slavery. One, a horrific life-size sculpture called “Severed Black Hand,” was accompanied by a card describing it as the arm of one of the artist’s ancestors.

“Probably he’d make one of his asinine quips,” the woman added, turning away.

What a strange thing to say, I thought. Later I learned that she was making such comments, some of them scripted, to many of the people looking at the art. Indeed, she was part of it.

“Master,” a Foundry Theater production at the Irondale Theater Center, is a mouthful of a multihyphenate work: an intimate-immersive-multimedia-performance art exhibition and play. But if it begins in a kind of constructed confusion, as it did for me, it ends in something disturbing and powerful. And Twain, asinine or not, has everything to do with it.

The elaborate setup imagines theatergoers as guests at a memorial service for one James Leroy Clemens, a fictitious Afro-Futurist artist. Called Uncle Jimmy, he spent his life creating a series of “illuminations” in response to Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” These paintings, sculptures, video games, sound installations and ephemera — many the work of Wardell Milan — are the pieces surrounding us along the periphery of the room. They have been curated, we learn, by Uncle Jimmy’s widow: the gray-haired stranger with the strange comments.

It’s no accident that Mr. Hancock has named her Edna Finn; she’s white. Likewise, Uncle Jimmy’s names, both first and last, tie him to the “Huck Finn” character Jim, who may have been based in part on an actual Clemens family slave. Whether we are meant to understand these connections as literally genealogical or just metaphorical, “Master” does not insist. But it hardly matters. When Edna suddenly steps out of the crowd and up to a podium to make some “family remarks,” we feel the ancient push-pull of white and black reasserting itself.

“Uncle Jimmy didn’t paint white people,” Edna says with what she hopes will sound like woke resignation. “Wasn’t interested in them. He never painted my portrait. That was the one thing that continues to sting.”

What Jimmy was interested in was reappropriating for black art a character he believed Twain had stolen and abused. A card next to a 1954 Classics Illustrated comic of “Huck Finn” features a deadpan (and imaginary) quote from Twain saying, “Sure I borrowed your people’s stories but at least I cut out the heart and soul before half-baking.”

Much scholarly work on “Huck Finn” has focused on Twain’s portrayal of Jim. Is he the profound moral center of the masterpiece, or a minstrel-show character mocked with impunity and sold up the river for laughs? Nor have such questions been merely a campus phenomenon. A recent brouhaha over the Encores! revival of “Big River” found some critics, myself included, questioning the continued viability of a musical that uses Jim and the other slave characters mostly as entertaining interludes between scenes of a white boy’s moral journey.

These very real questions get quite a workout in “Master,” though they are so anchored in its fictional scenario that they feel personal, not abstract. At the same time, the personal is in no way conventional. The drama is something that seems to be leaking from the very forms so elaborately carpentered to contain it. Of course, that too is deliberate. Under the direction of Taibi Magar, the chaos is beautifully engineered.

And so after Edna delivers her loving but prickly eulogy — she and Uncle Jimmy were estranged during his last years — she waves up to the podium an apparently unexpected guest. This is her stepson, James Soulbutter Clemens, Uncle Jimmy’s son from a previous relationship. James, now a gay performance artist under the name Blackout, shares some of his father’s anger about white appropriation but has plenty left over for a more intimate kind: the appropriation by a selfish artist of his child’s security.

“I needed a car more than I needed a painting,” James mutters. “You can’t sleep in a painting. You can’t drive a painting to work.”

If Edna’s story is surprising, James’s is unnerving. What are we to make of his recognition that, like Jim in “Big River,” he was just an interlude in a more powerful person’s moral journey? Was it a form of assimilation or revenge that, in high school, he himself tried out for “Big River”?

The perspectival spirals and formal riddles announced by the artwork before the play proper expand dizzyingly within it. There are meta-textual conundrums as well: Mr. Hancock is white, Mr. Milan black, Ms. Magar Egyptian-American. (Who is appropriating what?) These free-range confusions and provocations would almost seem incapable of corralling, yet Ms. Magar, who recently directed “Underground Railroad Game,” another disorienting treatment of slavery in the black and white imagination, manages to find the sweet spot between shallowness and overthink.

One key to this success is the unusually high quality of the performances. Anne O’Sullivan, as Edna, and Mikeah Ernest Jennings, as James, mine real emotion from what reads on the page as a recalcitrant text. They also feign spontaneity gorgeously, which makes the audience feel it genuinely.

But it is also the unusually good fit between material and medium that makes “Master” exceptional. Mr. Hancock, a genre-blender from way back, has said he is “not writing plays for theater, but writing them to escape theater.” With “Master,” he drags the audience along. When I was accosted by Edna at the beginning of the show, I was in essence being warned that minding my own business while looking at art was the last thing I should be doing.